Work continues on Preview-Latex. David Kastrup
does all the heavy lifting, but I'm keeping up on the
build-related stuff. I haven't had a chance to do the
mega-gs stuff (allowing configure to choose the best image
type supported by both Emacs and gs, and checking if the
installed gs supports antialiasing) but the more critical
things are getting done. Nice to work on.

I'm doing more LaTeX stuff myself right now, but since it's
a cookbook [currently] without pictures, I don't have
anything for preview to preview.

The basic "configure;make;sudo make install" does work in
most cases. It works perfectly for me, on a basic Linux
box, and has for at least 6 years.

If it's not working for you, it's a bug the maintainers
would really like to hear about.

First, a few specific suggestions:

make bootstrap is not required if you get the
source tarballs, only if you download to CVS. If you don't
know much about futzing with Emacs source, you should
probably start with the source tarball, even if (at the
moment) it's hard to get at. (It sounds as if you did have
the tarballs, but some people on gnu.help.emacs got CVS and
wondered why it didn't work.)

If you aren't getting happy X things, it's likely that
you don't have all the development packages installed. The
configure script gave a nice list at the bottom of what it
thinks you do and don't have. You probably need to install
the -dev or -devel versions of the relevant packages, then
rm config.cache and rerun configure. Emacs can't list the
required packages for all Linux distributions, because they
all have different names, but if you can come up with text
in the INSTALL which would have helped you come to the right
conclusion, submit it as a bug.

If you still have problems, send as much detail as you
have to bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org. If you have a working emacs
of any version, M-x report-emacs-bug will set things up for
you.

I don't really know what your specific problems are, since
./configure && make && make install have worked for me on
all boxes I've tried (Linux and HPUX), unless they didn't
have the development packages installed. If you can figure
it out, report it and they'll fix it. If you can't, try
posting to gnu.emacs.help with details.

djcb: With a revived love of TeX and Emacs
21, you sound like a perfect tester for preview-latex, which
will insert previews of math, figures, and tables directly
into your Emacs buffer. It's been the only free software
I've had time to help with lately, and it's really neat.

The biggest problem about Code Red so far is the huge
amounts of concern it causes among people who run "personal
firewalls" and are freaking out about lots of ARPs and
failed port 80 hits. Especially those who have ZoneAlarm
set to pop up a window every time something tries to
connect to port 80. They complain "This is ridiculous, I
can't get any work done because I have to keep closing this
popup! Make these attacks stop!"

There's little more frustrating than learning new things
without the chance to use them.

I've been reading all sorts of guide to good programming.
Design Patterns and the like. Unfortunately, I'm
currently in a job where nobody's heard of SDLC, nobody has
time to apply it, all architectural work was done years
ago, and it's a matter of adding a business rule here and a
report there. OO? Not even a consideration. We can't
even come up with a decent set of internal tools, either
because nobody will agree on them, nobody is given time to
implement things people agree on, or they are still-born
because "you can't teach all [five] of the developers to do
that."

Now, while rigorous software design could surely help this
company, it's hard to convince other people of that where
average projects need to be done in a week and there are
vast expanses of code that are so fragile that any
attempt to modify them break... even when the person doing
the modification has been with the company for >10 years.

This has taught me something: you must keep some
distance from customer demands. Part of our problem is
that we try to provide extremely short turnaround on
customer requests, quoting them a price and due date before
getting anything more than a vague request. There are no
requirements drawn up, yielding the expected iteration of
code, test, deliver, repeat. There's no time for
reflection, to think whether the architecture needs to be
changed, or how this should be generalized.

Regression testing was attempted and abandoned before I
arrived at the company, and internal documentation is of
the "Ask Bob" variety.

Combine this with the report
that ebizo mentioned, and it amazes me
that any software works at all. Where are the companies
that follow good practices? (And are any on Long Island hiring?)

I think you should be happy about the fact that the iBook
finally has a halfway decent resolution LCD even if it did
lose the annoying color scheme. As a Thinkpad toter, I'm
rather happy bith my black slab, since it's bigger and
faster than an iBook, which means I can have more fun with
it. (Of course, it also cost more....) If you're more
concerned with appearance than what's
inside, get a can of spraypaint....

Me:

Time for me and my black slab to do a crosscountry trip,
unfortunately the only hacking I'll likely do will be
work-related. But it did give me an excuse to pick up a
power inverter so I can charge in the car.

Have the new replacement for Springies set up, which
is good. Still need to set up the CD-RW, which will involve
tithing for a new SCSI cable.

Note to self: It's nice that your laptop can go till lunch
on battery, but it would be even nicer if you remembered to
bring the power cord so it didn't have to!

This just hasn't been my morning. I'm out of Dr Pepper at
work and I forget my power supply. Duh....

Not much hacking done lately. I'm putting a replacement
together for my home
server, to replace the 6.5 year old Pentium 60. It
still works, but it's gotten to the point where I'm afraid
to open it up for fear it won't start up again. The
new machine is a PowerEdge 1400SC from Dell. It's not running the
factory RHL install since I'm switching machines over to
Debian. The only unhappiness about that is the server
agent won't work... but Dell doesn't supply kernel modules
for any recent kernel anyway. They really should wake up
and see that not even RH thinks 2.2.16 is a good
idea anymore.

Picked up a USB joystick to play old Wing Commander IV. So
I have my first USB toy and it already works under Linux.
Very good, anyone who had anything to do with it!

One fewer sourceless project on sourceforge. Scrapbook has
been released. Don't let the high version number induce
thoughts of stability or features! But since the app has
worked for me for a couple years, I felt it deserved the
version number of 0.02.

Got my domain name working, so everyone can visit my
incipient website. I
haven't maintained a website in at least 3-4 years, so this
is from scratch. Learning CSS and catching up on HTML4 so
that it hopefully sucks not as much as other sites.

While I'm doing this, I've started a sourceforge project for
Album (now Scrapbook). I intend to do a quick replace of
the names and upload CVS onto there, then do a quick release
of things as they are now. It isn't a perfect app, but it
works for me and hopefully more users will induce me to
spend more time improving it. I'll post a link to the
project as soon as it actually has something up... at least
a minimal webpage or something.